“Who were the officers?”
“General Cervantes was there, sir, but he left for La Bufa. So was Villa’s brother, and Rodolfo Fierro.”
“What about Colonel Cárdenas?”
“Broke away from us at Guerrero. Took off after some Carranzista general.”
With a grunt, Black Jack pulled a military map from his battered pigskin briefcase. He punched his finger into the brown area northwest of Parral.
“You see this range? We’ve had reports that Villa’s there, hiding in a cave or some peasant’s hut. Somewhere around Pahuirachic or San Nicolás. They say he can’t move. How does he intend to get to Parral?”
Unable to restrain himself, Tompkins broke in. “General, excuse me. Those goddam reliable reports aren’t worth a fart in a windstorm. So far they’ve told us that Villa is everywhere and nowhere. Here’s a man who’s seen him and knows he’s heading for Parral, and that’s what I’ve said all along he’d do! Now if I go down there with two troops of the Thirteenth and a dozen pack mules—a flying column—I can get to Parral around the same time he does. The farther south we go, the more trouble we have. Bad supplies, tough trails, higher mountains. And a more hostile people. A larger command couldn’t conceal itself. A flying column can punch through.”
The general didn’t reply, but turned again to me. “Where in Parral will he stay?”
“I don’t know that yet. But if I get there ahead of Major Tompkins, I can find out. Although in my opinion, sir, you should send a larger force.”
“Oh?” Pershing showed his teeth in a thin smile. “And what’s the basis for your opinion … Colonel Mix?”
The basis was that I wanted to steer the expedition away from Pahuirachic. But I had to think of something else that was likely.
“Parral’s held by a Carranzista garrison, but there are fifteen thousand civilians in the city. They think of Villa as one of their own. What’s two cavalry troops in your army? A hundred men, maybe a bit more. They might surprise Villa, but they might get cut up awfully bad if they don’t. Once you’re in Parral, it’s hard to get out. It’s in a valley. There are only three trails that lead in or out.”
“And why do the people in Parral think so much of Pancho Villa?”
“He was born nearby, and he built a school there four years ago. They never had one before that.”
“A school?” That tickled Pershing’s fancy. “What is he, a general or a construction worker?” ,
“He’s a revolutionist, sir. That’s the kind of thing he does.”
He chuckled and said, “I suppose nobody’s all bad.” Then he turned to Major Tompkins.
“Frank, take four troops, not two. I’ll send units from the Tenth and Eleventh to cover your rear. The Seventh can head over to La Bufa. The Fifth will look around El Sauz. Now that we know where Villa’s going, the main force will sit right here.”
That suited me perfectly.
All the while Lieutenant Patton had been sweating in the sun, hands clasped behind his back. Now he piped up. “Sir, with your permission, can I accompany Major Tompkins’ flying column?”
“Why, George?”
Patton’s voice rose nearly an octave. “I want to see some action, sir.”
“Permission denied. I want you to take a troop and ride east toward Rubio. Sergeant Chicken and the other Apaches say there are Villistas somewhere in the desert, foraging and recruiting and raising hell. He thinks it may be Julián Cárdenas. Could you recognize him if you saw him?”
“He was driving the wagon I intercepted at Hot Wells. Thin man, about thirty. Black eyes, drooping mustache. Looked mean.”
“Find him for me.”
That made me uneasy, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it because Pershing turned to me and said, “Mix, you’ll go with Major Tompkins.”
“Me, sir?”
“You know the trails. You say you know the town. Guide him there. Discover where Villa’s hiding. Do your job.”
“What if any of Villa’s men see me riding with your cavalry? My life won’t be worth a dish of beans.”
“We’ll give you a uniform. No one will recognize you.”
That was settled, and he turned once again to Major Tompkins.
“Frank, find Pancho Villa. Wounded, alive or dead. But find him and bring him back.”
I was glad to be rid of Patton, although Major Frank Tompkins was no easy substitute; it was like swapping a wolf cub for its mama. But he warmed up to me on the way south when we started talking about horses. He was riding a beautiful little black called Kingfisher, a young Arab stallion whom I had admired for his springy step and alert head. Tompkins was a Minnesotan who had joined the cavalry straight out of military school and then served in Arizona and the Philippines—one of those old-line officers who had graduated the hard school of the frontier where a soldier was taught to consider his horse first and himself last, and where once on the trail he would stick to it until the quarry was run to earth or he was out of bullets.
He was a demanding officer, but he treated his men like human beings. They had smuggled along a few bottles of tequila provided by the Chinese peddlers in Bachinava. One of his platoon leaders, Sergeant Richley, reported this fact to Tompkins, and the first time we bivouacked the major made a little speech.
“Now look here, boys—I know all about the tequila. I’m not an unreasonable man, and I know you might need a little drink at reveille to clear your throats … and maybe another at morning mess to wash down the beans … and of course after cleaning up his horses a man has to wipe the stink from his lungs. A sociable drink at supper is okay, and one or two along the march for stamina … and maybe a couple more to help you get a decent night’s sleep. But none of this constant nip, nip, nip, and sip, sip, sip! There’s a limit.”
The trail I picked led south through the sierra, a steady uphill climb through a barbarous land. We had started in the afternoon, and it grew quickly cold with a wind whipping and whistling between the peaks, so that the men unrolled their blankets and threw them over their shoulders like Yaquis.
Above nine thousand feet it began to snow, and horses’ hoofs slipped on round stones that they couldn’t see. The beasts panted and blew clouds of thin vapor. The troopers had already suffered thirst and sunburn in the desert. Now their lips cracked from the cold, their noses bled from the altitude, their heads ached from the wind.
We quickly picked up the tracks of about twenty ponies, and Sergeant Chicken, the Apache scout who had herded us from Hot Wells to El Paso last October, said they were Villistas. A short, sinewy man of about fifty, he was the oldest of all the scouts, who sported names like Hell Yet-Suey, Skitty Joe Pitt, B-25 and Loco Jim. Chicken had long greasy black hair, a nut-brown face and bloodshot eyes, and he wore a red silk neckerchief with a silver concho slide. He sang to himself all the time, his neck veins bulging, wailing words that none of us understood. Years ago he had fought with the Chiracahua against Pershing, and when he said, “Villistas,” Tompkins believed him.
So we pressed on into the darkness, and the wind became a gale. Snow flailed our faces and turned my forehead icy. When the trail grew rockier and more narrow, we had to dismount and lead the horses. We had been in columns of squads, but now we pushed along in single file, trying to keep in touch with the horse in front, stumbling on the hidden stones like blind men. The trail wound through a rocky chasm, turned about in the opposite direction, then corkscrewed up the steep slope of the mountain.
Tompkins was right behind me, leading his stallion. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “this is worse than a Montana winter. And in the daytime it’s worse than an Arizona summer. What kind of a country is this?”
“One you shouldn’t travel in at night,” I told him, shouting to make sure he heard me above the wind.
“Villa does it,” he yelled back. “What Villa does, the U.S. cavalry can do!”
“Major, he’s in a hurry. We’re not. Let’s stop this foolishness.”
Luckily the snow h
ad eased by then. The clouds parted to reveal a moon and we came to a flat place with a grove of oaks. Tompkins grumpily called a halt—he knew it was getting too hard for the horses.
The men bivouacked, building little fires in the grove. The horses were fed their grain and picketed to graze. The wind howled with greater violence than before. It knocked over the tin cups, filling the meat cans with sand and gravel; it blew the kindling right out of the fires. We chewed a meager meal of hard bread and jerky, and Major Tompkins gave me some of his pinole, parched corn ground to powder and mixed with water, which he said tasted like a combination of birdseed and chickenshit but was plenty nourishing.
He also showed me a trick I had never seen. He dug a shallow trench the width of his body, built a tiny fire in it that was useless to cook on, but when the earth was warm enough to suit him he raked the coals away and crawled in with his saddle and Kingfisher’s bridle. He pulled his blanket over both lips of the trench. He had learned that in Montana, he told me, in the winter of ‘89. I tried it and started to sweat. It was too damned hot in there.
When the wind died down for a while, Tompkins poked his head out and asked me if I would care for a belt of tequila as a nightcap.
“Major, I wouldn’t mind a little ice-cold lemonade if you’ve got it. I’m roasting in this hole. In Chihuahua this is the way they cook sheep.” He chuckled, and I heard the bottle gurgle a couple of times.
“How long you been in Mexico, Mix?”
“Three years to the day that Columbus got raided.”
“You ever make any sense out of their politics?”
“They’re all thieves, except Villa.”
“That’s just what General Scott says. He likes the man. I can’t figure that out.”
I thought I had better amend my statement somewhat; I didn’t want to sound too enthusiastic for the quarry we were supposed to be hunting.
“If you don’t like what Villa stands for, Major, he’s a thief too. But Mexico’s a funny country. They’re so poor down here they make the Apache look like bankers. I’ve heard it said that ‘to steal is to live, and not to steal is to fall into the pit the devil dug for cowards and honest men.’ I guess you could say the politicians are less cowardly than most.”
Tompkins chuckled and took another swig. “You a Republican, Mix?”
“Hell, no. I’m a Texan.”
“If that means you voted for Mr. Wilson and the Democrats, you made a big mistake. I talked to some of these Mexicans up in Casas Grandes, and they hate our guts. They look on us as invaders. We’re here to rid them of a bandit, and all we’ve accomplished so far is to make the people think of him as a hero. I’ve heard some of them—Carranzista officers, by God!—say they’d consider it a national disgrace if we capture him. And I lay that situation right at Mr. Wilson’s doorstep. If we had Taft in the White House there wouldn’t have been a Columbus raid. Then there wouldn’t have been a need to freeze our asses off in these mountains, because the Mexicans would have held the U.S. of A. in respect instead of contempt.”
“I don’t know too much about that, Major. The truth is, I was too young to vote. Sleep well, sir.”
I curled in my trench, which had cooled down a bit and was nicely comfortable. Soon I would be in Parral. I didn’t much relish showing up with troops of the United States Cavalry, but once I had dispatched them to some more southerly point I could get about the other pressing business of my life. Now that I was on my way, I knew even less than before what I would do. I missed Rosa. She was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I couldn’t imagine anything better. But I missed Elisa too. I listened to the night wind blow—it bore no messages—and worried myself to sleep.
Come morning the sky was frosty blue and the wind only ghosted through the canyon. The soldiers cooked bacon and hardtack in their mess kits and then fed and shod their horses. There were no more oats so the horses had to eat corn, which they hated. The Chihuahua corn had little pebbles in it, and each man carefully spread the feed on his blanket and picked them out before putting it in the nosebag. Once a horse bit a pebble he would snort in disgust and stop eating, no matter how hungry he was. Tompkins told me that on the march south to Bachinava the difference in temperature—sometimes seventy degrees from day to night—had killed more than fifty of the brutes. Even the ones that were left had thinned down so that their ribs and withers stuck through their skins. The mountain trails wore out their shoes, and if they stubbed their toes on the rocks they would often cast the iron free.
The third day out the troopers became grumpy. We were still in high country with gray clouds that floated past our faces and sometimes swallowed men whole. We had no coffee or sugar, only hardtack, potatoes and cowboy dough—flour, water and a pinch of salt fried in bacon grease. It was good grub for a hungry man, but all I craved were some tacos and guacamole laced with chile.
I guess my stomach knew even better than I did which side I was really rooting for.
On the fourth morning we were somewhere near Pahuirachic, and I was beginning to feel jittery. I hoped we wouldn’t run into any more tracks or some hungry Indian who thought he could pick up a good meal by telling that Villa was nearby in his cave. A gale blinded us with dust. As we passed out of a gorge onto a sheet of volcanic rock that rose toward a pine forest, we heard the sound of a sputtering engine. Every man in the column looked up.
A minute later an airplane, a Martin Model S, appeared over the mountains from the south, buffeted up and down by the whirlwind. It couldn’t have been more than three hundred feet above our heads, and I ducked mine down and got ready to hit the dirt. Just as it flew over us, bucking and jumping like a beefsteaked mustang, it shot upwards, did a somersault, then plunged toward the forest of pines. In a few seconds it vanished from our sight.
“Come on!” Tompkins yelled to his advance guard.
We had taken a good bearing, but as we spurred up the rocksheet we expected any second to hear a fearful crash and then find a mangled aviator.
What we found was the ship rightside up, uninjured, sitting prettily on a brown meadow strewn with rocks. The propeller turned over a few more times as we dashed up, then shuddered to a stop. The pilot, whose name turned out to be Lieutenant Christie, climbed out on the wing and jumped to the ground.
When he took off his goggles we saw he had the face of a cherub—bright blue eyes, ruddy lips, and he’d never had to pay hard cash for a razor strop.
Tompkins reached him first and slid off Kingfisher. “Good Lord, boy! I thought it was taps for you! How did you get out of it?”
“God had me by the hand,” Christie said.
“He sure tossed you up and down before He let go. Are you okay?”
“Got anything to eat?” Christie asked.
While we fed him he told us he had just spotted a force of about thirty armed Mexicans moving between Pahuirachic and San Nicolás on a mountain trail. That was the main function of the Aero Squadron in this campaign: to deliver messages and scout for enemy troop concentrations.
“Villistas?”
“Beats me, sir.” Christie explained he had been unable to follow them because of the downdrafts and the whirlwind.
Tompkins wasted no time. “Lieutenant, we’re going after them. Can you fly out of here, or do you want to join us?”
“I can’t leave my ship, Major. When the wind dies down, I’ll take off for Bachinava.”
“Good luck, then!” Tompkins jumped up on Kingfisher, and off he went, across the meadow and through the forest, with me thundering after.
I was more than disturbed; I was demoralized. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I knew who Christie had spotted, and if the Thirteenth Cavalry fell upon the chief while he was moving camp, he wouldn’t stand a chance. He would be outnumbered and probably being carried in the litter, which meant he couldn’t even try to escape. And I would be riding with the men who would capture or kill him. That thought made me want to howl, and it gave wings to my imagination.
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br /> We had to slow down between the pine trees, and I kicked Maximilian up to Major Tompkins.
“Sir, let me go ahead! There may be a good way to bushwhack them. If we come on them like a thundering herd, they’ll head in ten different directions into the brush.”
“What brush?” Tompkins pointed at the rocky mountain slopes.
“For Villa there’s always brush.”
Tompkins cocked an eye at me. We pounded onto the rock face. “Take Sergeant Chicken with you,” he yelled. “Don’t fire your rifle. Just locate them and report back. We’ll follow.”
“Yes, sir!”
I hoped to avoid Chicken, but Tompkins was already waving to him. The Apache jumped smoothly onto his mare and trotted over from the troop waiting on the trail. The bugler was already sounding “Boots and Saddles.” Tompkins repeated the orders, and Chicken and I galloped off together toward Pahuirachic.
There wasn’t much to know about Apaches—they didn’t let you know much—but if you were brought up on the border you understood two things about them. They hated Mexicans. and as scouts they could track a bee in a blizzard or follow a wood tick on solid rock in the dark of the moon. They could tell by twigs and bent grass just how long ago an animal had passed by, and if it were a man they could tell you the color of his hair. There was no way I was going to fool this dark old fellow galloping along at my side.
We shot through the huts of Pahuirachic, scattering chickens and pigs, and then Sergeant Chicken took the lead on his mare and veered off the trail into a stand of juniper. He raised one hand.
We stopped in the shadows. He dismounted and I followed suit.
The warm air was silky and still, and some drowsy shafts of sunlight floated through the trees. Chicken murmured to me so softly that I could hardly hear him, “Maybe fifteen, twenty men. They ride at a slow trot. Maybe two, three hundred yards ahead.”
I craned my neck around the trunk of a juniper, listening to the rustle of the leaves and peering through the green shadows. There was nothing. “You see them?” I asked.
“Saw the tracks,” he said.
TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Page 55